“Hardly the grandson’s fault.”
“So why has he been hiding him?”
“We’re not likely to find out if we have him gunned down in the street.”
“And if he’s allowed to talk, then the media coverage we’ve seen so far is going to look like a PR script. This is a turning point, Claude. It’s not just your career that’ll be over. And mine. It’s the Service as we know it. Which is imperfect, sure, and sometimes slow to respond, but we can make those things better—you and I. But not if this fiasco becomes public. If that happens, we’ll have nothing to build on. Because there’ll be no trust and no public belief. It’ll all be buried under the Westacres rubble.”
If Taverner hadn’t been here, he’d have reached for his wife’s photo. Would have found strength in that contact, even though she would never agree to what was being offered him: a swift way out of a situation not of his making. But then, he had been here before, hadn’t he? He had found his way out of corners in ways that Claire wouldn’t have approved of. Corners she hadn’t known he’d been in.
“What about David Cartwright?” he said at last.
“He’ll turn up eventually. But it’s not like he’s going to be making any sense. No, this is our chance to make everything go away. And it’s not even a push, Claude. It’s a nudge. The Met will be going in heavy-mannered whatever recommendations you make.”
“I can’t give instructions to the police force.”
“But you can make a call to the PM.”
He could feel it sliding out of his reach, any sense that he had a choice in what was about to happen.
“Young Cartwright is not an enemy of the state.”
“If he’s discovered what his grandfather did, then he very likely is. Because that would mean he has information that can do serious—irreparable—damage to the Service. And if that doesn’t make him an enemy of the state, I don’t know what would.”
It had been hours, he thought, since she had referred to the sword she’d left dangling over his head; the false information he’d fed COBRA. Instead, she wanted him to find his own way to the decision she’d placed in front of him.
If he did what she wanted, he’d be bound forever in her coils.
If he didn’t, she’d throw him to the wolves.
With a wash of nostalgia, he remembered life across the river, where the worst he had to contend with was the passive-aggressive needling of his fellow weasels.
He said, “This isn’t right.”
“Maybe not the right thing to do. But it’s the right decision to make.”
Nothing in her demeanour, he thought, indicated that she’d ever had a moment’s self-doubt in her life.
Keeping his face as expressionless as possible, Claude Whelan reached for the phone.
A police car flashed past, or didn’t; the sky growled dramatically, or held its breath. Mermaids might have risen from the Thames, and the dazzle ship taken to the air. Probably all that happened, though, was the rain. If asked to reconstruct the moment later, that’s all River would have been able to swear to.
“. . . What did you say?”
“You heard me, River. I’m your father.”
“My father?”
“You want to hear it in a Darth Vader voice?”
River didn’t want to hear it at all.
He blinked several times, but nothing altered. They were under a shelter on the bank of the Thames, whose night-time reflections were rendered impressionist by steady rain. From the dazzle ship’s bar drifted a murmur of voices, and an unidentifiable tune. And here was Frank Harkness, who’d run some mysterious commune in the heart of France; who’d raised boys like Patrice, like Bertrand, and sent them out to be killers.
He had an English woman, I remember. I saw her once, or more than once. Perhaps these occasions have melted into one.
Natasha’s words, floating back to him the way those reflections floated on the water.
She was very beautiful, and very cross, the time I saw her, and they have big argument, big row, and Frank tells everyone to leave. And when we come back, she is gone.
His mother had never stayed with anyone long. Even her eventual marriage, which had elevated her into comfortable respectability, hadn’t gone the distance, her husband having succumbed to a dicky heart within three years of their union.
The distance she’d come, the respectability she’d assumed: all of that was summed up in her use of the phrase dicky heart.
“How can you possibly . . . ?”
He could almost see his words, so effortfully did they struggle into the air. And then crash to the ground, unable to reach the end of their sentence.
“We should go inside,” Frank said. With a tilt of the head, he indicated the bar behind them; the comfort room on the dazzle ship. “You look like you could use a drink.”
“. . . How can you possibly be my father?”
“Seriously? We need to have this conversation?” Frank shook his head. “I gathered you were a late starter, but—”
River grabbed him by the lapels and shook him, but it was clear that Frank was allowing himself to be shook. To be shaken. There was a solidity to his frame, something like a tree trunk—you could push on it all day and night, but there was no way you were toppling it without serious tools.
“That’s better,” Frank said. “For a moment there, I thought you were going to pass out. But this is better. You’re strong. You’ll do.”
“You’re lying.”
“You know I’m not. If you thought I was, it’s the first thing you’d have said.”
River let him go. “That’s just mind games. That’s bullshit. You can’t possibly—”
But already it felt like knowledge he’d been deliberately resisting till now. Already it felt like he was the last to know.
“We met, we fell in love, she became pregnant. Your grandfather didn’t approve, do I need to tell you that?”
The O.B. and his mother, and the rift that had driven them apart. For years he’d watched on the sidelines, with neither party giving anything away. He had missed the original Cold War by years. This one would do until the next came along.
“He drove a wedge between us. What did she tell you about me?”
“Nothing. She told me nothing. She never speaks of you.”
“Well, you have to hand it to the old man. When he drives a wedge, it stays driven.”
This time a police car did flash past, though flash was not the word. It slowed, rather, while its occupants gave them the once-over, before negotiating the chicane the roadworks had assembled. There was other traffic too, none of it important.
“Why did he do that?”
“Drive us apart?”
“Yes. Why would he do that, especially if—if me. If she was pregnant. Why would he do that?”
“Maybe he didn’t like the thought of having a Yank for a son-in-law. Or he was worried I’d take his precious daughter way over the big blue sea.”
“No.”
“No he didn’t find her precious, or—”
“No, you’re lying. None of that’s anywhere near the truth.”
He was thinking of all those years, all those conversations. All the times his grandfather had asked “whether he’d heard from his mother”: never using “Isobel,” as if this would presume on a deeper acquaintance . . . He had missed her terribly for all of River’s life, without ever admitting it out loud. And the reasons he was being offered here were nowhere near enough to account for that.
Frank said, “Okay, there was a little more to it. Your grandfather—he was a great one for making deals.”